This invention relates to managing an inventory of portable devices, and more particularly to tracking the locations of devices that are stored in various areas (such as rooms) throughout a facility and determining the conditions of the devices.
Portable devices are used by many different types of facilities. Hospitals, for example, use large numbers of portable patient care devices (such as pacemakers, vital signs monitors, and fluid infusion pumps). When the devices are not in use, they are typically placed in one of numerous storage areas (e.g., storerooms) distributed throughout the hospital until they are needed again. Hospital personnel should be able to rapidly determine where the devices are stored, as well as the number of devices that are available for use, both to ensure adequate patient care and to efficiently manage the .inventory of devices.
One way of monitoring the locations of the stored devices is to track the devices manually as they are placed in, and later removed from, the storage areas. The conditions of the devices (e.g., ready for use, repair needed, cleaning required, etc.) are indicated by affixing tag to them that have a characteristic (such as color) indicative of the condition, and making a like entry in the manual tracking system.
The typical manual inventory management schemes rely on personnel to deliver and retrieve devices broadly distributed throughout the building. Lack of a mechanism to locate the devices in use or in temporary storage requires hard-to-implement policies that result in room-to-room searches to locate the devices. As a result, inventories of the devices often are expanded to meet the needs of the facility, and users may resort to hording the devices to assure their availability.
Some manufacturing facilities track locations of portable equipment on a factory floor by placing transmitters (e.g., infrared emitters or RF tags) on the devices, and positioning receivers at several locations around the floor. The signal sent by each transmitter includes a unique code that identifies the device, and the position of the device is determined based on characteristics (e.g., strength or phase) of that signal as received by one or more receivers.